Dear Editor,
My pursuits since the 2015 elections campaign have taken me on a different course and thus I do not pay much attention to verbal emissions from Freedom House or in particular the pedantic nonsense associated with their leader Bharrat Jagdeo. But I was sent a piece from the Guyana Times captioned ‘Jagdeo unveils massive corruption scandal’ dated August 6, 2015. It cannot be logical that persons who were in office during a period when gross financial improprieties took place now have the brass to pretend that they are the new messiah on a crusade against corruption.
The essence of the statement was that he (Jagdeo) believed that the forensic audits were “initiated in an illegal nature”. He pointed out that the APNU+AFC government provided these audits to its staunch supporters, namely Dr Anand Goolsarran and Mr Christopher Ram. What poppycock!
The Procurement Act, 2003 states clearly that a procuring entity may single-source when:
“owing to a catastrophic event, there is an urgent need for the … service… making it impractical to use other methods of procurement because of the time involved in using other methods of procurement”.
The Minister of Finance was totally in order to use the services of anyone to conduct these forensic audits using sole sourcing because it would have been financially imprudent to take over the financial books without establishing the closing balance sheets and income statements at each entity after over a decade of financial impropriety. If full tendering processes were used, the earliest these audits would have commenced would have been the end of July 2015. That would have been too late for the new APNU+AFC government and would have provided enough time for any corrupt person still in the system, to cover their tracks.
What I cannot support is the single sourcing of the annual audits since that is a programmed activity that is planned for well in advance. However these forensic audits are a one-off emergency and thus qualify for single-sourcing. As to Dr Goolsarran, I personally know of situations where he was asked to join the campaigns but both in 2011 and 2015 he politely refused stating that he really enjoys and values his work in civil society, especially what he was doing at the Guyana Chapter of Transparency International. I personally engaged Dr Goolsarran on many issues of a technical nature and on every single occasion, his advice was always technically clear and never political. So it is most dishonest to brand this brother as a political supporter of any political party. He lives a simple life and just wants his homeland to be a mecca of good governance. He sees himself as one of the custodians of good governance in Guyana and therefore you will never find him building any Taj Mahals by the seaside on two massive mansion lots. He shops at the market just like the ordinary people with his own money and does not run around the world living like a Caesar.
In conclusion, I observed of late, that the PPP operators have launched a campaign of extreme misinformation through several mediums, be it the Guyana Times, Citizens Report, Progressive News and the Mirror. Clearly GINA and NCN are ill prepared to respond to this barrage of misinformation on the actions of the APNU+AFC government emanating from Freedom House. Yet to date, the independent news houses like Kaieteur News, Stabroek News and Capitol News cannot secure a radio licence to bring balance to this situation. This topic of the issuance of radio and/or TV licences to the professional news agencies has to be urgently revisited, so that we can empower the professionals to bring greater balance to the airwaves.
Yours faithfully,
Sase Singh
Washington DC
